When the likes of Marco Rubio, the new Republican senator from Florida, say this is the greatest country ever, sophisticated opinion-makers cluck and roll their eyes. What a noxious tea-party nostrum. How chauvinistic. What hubris.

Lowry didn't name any sophisticated opinion-makers who so clucked or rolled. Probably because none did. Or maybe one or two did. But I doubt they're really either sophisticated or opinion-makers.

I agree with Rubio. Most liberals do. Leftists are another matter. But I have little doubt that every one of my close friends, (American) liberals almost all, would vote for the US as the greatest country on earth.

But why does a column like Lowry's still seem ridiculous and kind of offensive to me? Andrew takes a whack (link above):

Imagine that once a month or so, Michael Jordan called a press conference, confidently listed his achievements as a basketball player, and insisted, "My greatness is simply a fact." He'd be correct: he was a spectacular basketball player, arguably the best in history. Same with Tiger Woods. Or Stephen Hawking. On the other hand, we're put off when people announce their own greatness – experience has taught that they're usually doing so because they're a braggart, or a narcissist, or a bully. (In Rich Lowry's case, it's intellectual bullying - wielding the collective club of nationalism against genuine worries about America's fiscal bankruptcy, academic decline, and economic stagnation).

That's all true. In addition, I have a somewhat different set of reasons for why I think the US is great. Here's Lowry:

We had the advantage of jumping off from the achievement of the British. We founded our nation upon self-evident truths about the rights of man, even if our conduct hasn't always matched them...

So far, I agree. Then:

We got constitutional government to work on a scale no one had thought possible; made ourselves a haven of liberty for the world's peoples; and created a fluid, open society. We amassed unbelievable wealth, and spread it widely. Internationally, we wielded our overwhelming military and industrial power as a benevolent hegemon. We led the coalitions against the ideological empires of the 20th century and protected the global commons. We remain the world's sole superpower, looked to by most of the world as a leader distinctly better than any of the alternatives.

Well, benevolent hegemon a lot of the time, but most definitely not all the time. But let's set that aside.

I think some things that made the US the greatest country in the world are Social Security, labor unions, integration (vociferously opposed by, say, the magazine Lowry edits), and the high taxation that helped us spread that amassed wealth so widely. Millions of other Americans agree with me. Even plenty of rich ones.

We worry that we're on our way to being a not-very-great and definitely-not-very-nice country, which is what we think we'll be if the conservatives have their way. So as I see it, Rubio - and, it must be said, Lowry himself, while a nice guy in my limited personal experience - are out to destroy that which makes America great. So you could say I think Rubio and Lowry hate America. But see, I don't usually talk like that, cuz they have their take, and I have mine, and on the world spins, and I don't actually think they hate America. I just think they're wrong about almost everything.

But conservatives do talk like that, ceaselessly, and they do it to score cheap points, and that's why liberals are bored by chest-thumpery of the Rubio or Lowry varieties.